Huck Finn Comparison Essay

Malcolm Sims
12/14/2010
3rd PeriodHuckleberry Finn Comparison EssayThe great American novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain is about a white southern raised child named Huck Finn and a runaway slave, Jim, running away together. This novel is similar in ways to that of the novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is about “the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love Daisy Buchanan.”(Book Cover) The character Huckleberry Finn is similar to characters of “The Great Gatsby.” Huck Finn is similar to Jay Gatsby because of their lies about their families, their reasons for lying, and their frames of reference of what not to do. Huck Finn is also similar to Myrtle Wilson. This is due to the fact that both try to create and live their “adventurous fantasy” lives and also because while trying to make their fantasy a reality they quickly forget about important people and belongings.

The character Huck Finn is similar to Jay Gatsby in two ways. The first way in which these characters are alike is between the lies they tell about their family. Huck Finn’s lies are about having a family and how “pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm down at the bottom of Arkansaw,” (Twain 75). While Gatsby’s lies are about how he has no family and how is the son of “some wealthy people in the Middle West -- all dead now.”(Fitzgerald 65). The major similarity of this is that they create these fantasy families because they are ashamed of their real family in a way which leads them to create their view of a good family.

Besides Huck Finn’s and Gatsby’s similarity in lies and their reasoning behind lying, these characters are also similar because they use the same type of person as a frame of reference of what not to do or become. Jay Gatsby uses his deceased friend, Dan Cody, as his frame of reference. Dan Cody, when drunk, would commit acts of “savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.”(Fitzgerald 100) and...

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